Detection of different types of vehicles from aerial imagery

Abstract

Accurate detection of vehicles in large amounts of imagery is one of the harder objects’ detection tasks as the image resolution can be as high as 16K or sometimes even higher. Difference in vehicles size and their position (direction, they face) is another challenge to overcome to achieve acceptable detection quality. The vehicles can also be partially obstructed, cut off or it may be hard to differentiate between object colour and its foreground. Small size of vehicles in high resolution images complicates the task of accurate detection even more. CNN is one of the most promising methods for image processing, hence, it was decided to use their implementation in YOLO V3. To deal with big high resolution images method for splitting/recombining images and augmenting them was developed. Proposed approach allowed to achieve 81.72% average precision of vehicles detection. Results show practical applicability of such approach for vehicles detection, yet to reach higher accuracy on tractor, off-road and van categories of the vehicles the count in different vehicle categories needs to be balanced, i.e. more examples of the mentioned vehicles are required.